Ordering products over the internet for home delivery is an extremely popular way of shopping. Fulfilling such orders in a timely, accurate and efficient manner is logistically challenging to say the least. Clicking the “check out” button in a virtual shopping cart creates an “order.” The order includes a listing of items that are to be shipped to a particular address. The process of “fulfillment” involves physically taking or “picking” these items from a large warehouse, packing them, and shipping them to the designated address. An important goal of the order-fulfillment process is thus to ship as many items in as short a time as possible.
The order-fulfillment process typically takes place in a large warehouse that contains many products, including those listed in the order. Among the tasks of order fulfillment is therefore that of traversing the warehouse to find and collect the various items listed in an order. In addition, the products that will ultimately be shipped first need to be received in the warehouse and stored or “placed” in storage bins in an orderly fashion throughout the warehouse so they can be readily retrieved for shipping.
In a large warehouse, the goods that are being delivered and ordered can be stored in the warehouse very far apart from each other and dispersed among a great number of other goods. With an order-fulfillment process using only human operators to place and pick the goods requires the operators to do a great deal of walking and can be inefficient and time consuming. Since the efficiency of the fulfillment process is a function of the number of items shipped per unit time, increasing time reduces efficiency.
Robot assisted order-fulfillment systems have been used to increase efficiency and productivity. Such systems which utilize human operators to work in conjunction with robots have been demonstrated to provide significant improvements in efficiencies. Based on instructions received from a robot an operator may be used to select one or more items from shelving proximate the robot and place the selected item(s) on the robot. The robot would then move to one or more additional locations to retrieve other items which would be selected from shelving by other operators. Once the robot has completed “picking” its order, it travels to a packing station where operators package the items and ship them to customers.
Similarly, a robot may be assigned to “place” a number of items in various locations dispersed throughout the warehouse. In performing this function, the robot would begin at an operator station and be loaded with items and instructions regarding the locations of the items to be stored in the warehouse. The robot would make its round trip dropping off items at various locations with the assistance of operators and then return to the operator station.
There are, however, inefficiencies with these system and improvements are needed to further increase efficiency and throughput of such robot assisted order-fulfillment systems.